Madam - Jenny Angell

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in the sales area of some low-income housing developments on the edge of North Cambridge, Massachusetts, and moonlighted answering the telephone for the maintenance department. The first clue I had that I was in the wrong place was when a couple of the guys refused to fix the toilet in a certain tenant’s apartment. The tenant in question didn’t speak English, so I started giving the maintenance guys holy hell about discriminating against him.

      When one of them could finally get a word in, it was to say, “You know, lady, no one’s gonna go there. Two other maintenance guys almost got killed fixing stuff for that creep.”

      Oh.

      The second clue came when the news trucks all started coming around and people began shoving microphones in my face, asking me questions about the guy on the eighteenth floor who had just gotten arrested for running a prostitution ring out of his apartment.

      And all of that – those events, those situations that I can single out and point to – didn’t even touch the sheer bleakness of working there, in that world, with people who had lost every shred of hope they had ever had for a better life. Poverty is a grinding, daily, hurtful thing, and after a generation of it, most people cannot imagine a world that doesn’t involve welfare, or dealing drugs, or stints in prison, or wanting something with the only part of you that hasn’t accepted that you’ll never be able to have it. I know I’m a hypocrite to feel that way and not become a social worker, or something – anything to help ease people’s pain. Instead, I decided one thing: I wasn’t going to make a career out of being part of anybody’s misery. I wanted a modicum of happiness in my work.

      So I made some New Year’s resolutions in the middle of the summer and kicked the boyfriend out and thought for a while about my assets – what is fashionable, these days, to call a skills set. And I realized right away that what I’m good at – what I’m brilliant at – is talking. I can talk anybody into anything. I can sweet-talk operators into giving me information they never planned to give out. I’ve always had this big double bed and I sit there with my telephone and my Yellow Pages and man, I’m all set. I can get just about anything I need with my phone and my Yellow Pages.

      On the other hand, what do people do who are good on the telephone? I certainly didn’t want to do telemarketing. Yuck. Interrupting people having dinner to try and sell them subscriptions to some magazine they’d never read anyway. It just didn’t work for me.

      So I sat and called everyone I knew and didn’t get any closer to figuring out what to do with my so- called career. I took a couple of temp jobs working as a receptionist for high-tech companies and resigned myself to doing something like that in the foreseeable future.

      When I finally happened on the ad in the newspaper – almost accidentally, on a day I had not set aside for job-hunting – I had no idea that it was going to change my life forever.

      * * * * * *

      Laura lived out in one of Boston’s suburbs – Wilmington, was it? Or maybe Lynnfield? – someplace like that, that’s what I remember. And even though my departed boyfriend hadn’t been good for much, he had managed to pay half the rent. Now I was struggling to manage it by myself. Come work for me, Laura said, and you can stay in my basement.

      It sounded pretty good to me. Work and a place to stay, just when I needed both. I said yes. I didn’t consider what people would think when they learned I was working for an escort service, even in the minor role of receptionist. I didn’t consider much of anything. This is probably typical of many of the women who work in the profession: it seems like an answer to a prayer, a way to make ends meet, a way to make a living, for heaven’s sake. And when the reactions trickle in, we’re always surprised by them.

      I didn’t think about people’s reactions. I just went to work for Laura.

      My first impression was how clean it was: everything was impeccable. Laura ran an escort service that was both in-call and out-call: some girls went out to clients’ homes; others saw the guys there, at Laura’s place. It was never called a bordello. In fact, in all my years in the business, I’ve never heard an in-call place called a bordello. We just called it Laura’s. Maybe it’s just a Boston thing.

      So I finally had a job. I was the receptionist; I greeted clients and took all the telephone calls. And listened to the bickering.

      “The sheets have to be clean,” Laura kept saying to the girls. That was her constant mantra. You wouldn’t think that clean sheets could ever become such an issue. Whose turn it was to change the sheets, who had last used the front room, who had done the laundry yesterday. That was all that the girls talked about: those damned sheets.

      The sheets weren’t my department. I got to talk to the guys.

      The clients came in all shapes and sizes, both figuratively and literally. Guys who knew exactly what they wanted, and guys who could be talked into seeing the girl who hadn’t had a call for two days. Young guys that you couldn’t figure out, for the life of you, why they couldn’t get a date on their own; and older men who clearly had no other recourse, even in Boston’s comparatively laid-back sexual climate.

      I got good at working the phones, and I got good at it fast. You had to – they’d keep you on the line all night, otherwise. “You have a great voice – you sure I can’t see you? What do you look like? What are you wearing right now?” I got good at deflecting them, just the right edge of flirtatiousness in my voice, just the right edge of business. When I didn’t work, and Laura did the phones, the clients complained. “Where’s Abby?”

      I was sleeping on a foldout sofa in her finished basement, sharing the room with an old foosball table and some castoff furniture and lamps from the bedrooms upstairs. That was just fine with me. I had a bank account, and every week I had more money to put into it – the eventual deposit on an apartment somewhere closer to the city than Wilmington.

      Because, to tell you the truth, when I wasn’t working, I was bored.

      Well, that’s not entirely true. I did have a car that ran most of the time, and when it was running there were a lot of things to do. It was summer, so I could go into Boston and sit on the Common or in the Public Gardens; in the fall I could go out to Concord and walk around Walden Pond. I could go to Lansdowne Street in town on my nights off and hang out in the clubs. But all of it, all the time, I did alone.

      I really didn’t know very many people. To be honest, on a day-to-day basis, I was fairly lonely. I didn’t have much of a social life. I worked nights, for one thing. And for another … well, all of my friends from college were starting their careers, or had moved away, or gotten married, or something. I felt a little bereft, as if some train had already pulled out of the station and I had just then realized that I was supposed to be on it.

      At Laura’s, though, I wasn’t bored. Here, things were always hopping. Guys stopping in, talking and laughing with me in the living room while they were passing the time before their “date” was free, the girls sitting around waiting to be chosen. It was a cattle call, and as a good feminist I wasn’t altogether comfortable with it. But it was money, extraordinarily good money. And it was more than that – okay, I’ll admit it: it really was exciting. As if I were on the cutting edge of something slightly risqué, slightly dangerous, slightly naughty. As, of course, I was.

      I guess the best thing to compare that feeling to is going out at night to the bars, the clubs. How you dance around when you’re getting ready to go out. How you have that little edge of excitement when you first get there, not knowing exactly what you’ll find, who you’ll meet. The tension. And then, when you do strike up a conversation, the flirting, the games, the playfulness and mystery, and the newness of it all. And if it goes well, holding the guy in your power, deciding whether you’re going to sleep with him or not, deciding how far you’re going to let him go, deciding if you’re going to be nice to him or cut him down. All that power, and instead of getting dressed up and going looking for it, it came to me. And I got paid for it. It was my job to be hip and seductive – and unattainable.

      “Hello?”

      “Yeah, um, I

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